Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you find is that we are simply not invited to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear that He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity, but always de haut en bas. (Have you ever noticed that your imagination can hardly be forced to picture Him as shorter than yourself?)

  The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, ‘Who or What is this?’ For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is, is not lovable or even tolerable. If He is, then of course it is another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity, we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible.

  On this whole aspect of the subject I should go on . . . to Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. You might also find Mauriac’s Vie de Jesus useful . . . If childish associations are too intrusive, in reading the New Testament it’s a good idea to try it in some other language, or Moffat’s translation.

  As for theology proper: a good many misunderstandings are cleared away by Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief. A book of composite authorship and of varying merit, but on the whole good, is Essays Catholic and Critical ed. E. G. Selwyn (S.P.C.K.). Gore’s The Philosophy of the Good Life (Everyman) is rather wordy, but taught me a lot. If you can stand serious faults of style (and if you can get them, they are long out of print) Geo. Macdonald’s 3 vols of Unspoken Sermons go to the very heart of the matter. I think you would also find it most illuminating to re-read now many things you once read in ‘Eng. Lit.’ without knowing their real importance—Herbert, Traherne, Religio Medici.

  As for a person ‘with whom to discuss’, choice is more ticklish. L. W. Grensted is very interested in psychoanalysis and wrote a book on its relations to Christianity: would that be an advantage or the reverse? O. C. Quick whom I know and like. Milford, the present rector of St Mary’s, some like and some don’t. Let me know what, or what sort you want, and I’ll see what can be done.

  Come and see me when you’re better and bring the gudeman.

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College

  16 April 1940

  Congratulations (if that is the right word) on becoming a Priest, and thanks for the pleasing woodcut. Yes: Melchisedech is a figure who might have been intended (nay, was intended, since God provides not for an abstraction called Man but for individual souls) for people who were being led to the truth by the peculiar route that you and I know.

  I do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they are only healthy when they are either (a) Definitely the handmaids of religious, or at least moral, truth—or (b) Admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or entertainment. Dante’s alright, and Pickwith is alright. But the great serious irreligious art—art for art’s sake—is all balderdash; and, incidentally, never exists when art is really flourishing. In fact one can say of Art as an author I recently read says of Love (sensual love, I mean) ‘It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god’. Isn’t that well put? So many things—nay, every real thing—is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.

  One thing we want to do is to kill the word ‘spiritual’ in the sense in which it is used by writers like Arnold and Croce. Last term I had to make the following remark to a room full of Christian undergraduates ‘A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep, in humility, thankfulness, and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride’—obvious to you, but I could see it was quite a new light to them.

  I don’t know what to think about the present state of the world. The sins on the side of the democracies are very great. I suppose they differ from those on the other side by being less deliberately blasphemous, fulfilling less the condition of a perfectly mortal sin. Anyway, the question ‘Who is in the right’ (in a given quarrel) is quite distinct from the question ‘Who is righteous?’—for the worse of two disputants may always be in the right on one particular issue. It is therefore not self righteous to claim that we are in the right now. But I am chary of doing what my emotions prompt me to do every hour; i.e. identifying the enemy with the forces of evil. Surely one of the things we learn from history is that God never allows a human conflict to become unambiguously one between simple good and simple evil?

  The practical problem about charity (in our prayers) is very hard work, isn’t it? When you pray for Hitler & Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ, who died for those very men (b) A recollection, as firm as one can make it, of all one’s own cruelty wh. might have blossomed, under different conditions, into something terrible. You and I are not, at bottom, so different from these ghastly creatures.

  I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich. What do you make of her? A dangerous book, clearly, and I’m glad I didn’t read it much earlier. (Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time?) One thing in her pleased me immensely. Contemptus mundi is dangerous and may lead to Manicheeism. Love of the creature is also dangerous. How the good of each is won, and the danger rejected, in her vision of ‘all that is made’ as a little thing like a hazel nut ‘so small I thought it could hardly endure’. Not bad, you see: just very, very small.

  I’m enclosing a book in which you might like the last essay. I’ve been busy this winter on a book called The Problem of Pain wh. I was asked to write for a thing called The Christian Challenge Series. I have hopes you may like it . . .

  TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

  18 April 1940

  On the marriage service. The three ‘reasons’ for marrying, in modern English are (a) To have children, (b) Because you are very unlikely to succeed in leading a life of total sexual abstinence, and marriage is the only innocent outlet, (c) To be in a partnership. What is there to object to in the order in which they are put?

  The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is the state described as ‘being in love’. Now I have nothing to say against ‘being in love’: but the idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine. In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it—and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, it often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on ‘love’ lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a ‘failure’, tho’ in fact they have just reached the point at wh. real marriage begins. Fourthly, it wd be undesirable, even if it were possible, for people to be ‘in love’ all their lives. What a world it wd be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance! The Prayer Book therefore begins with something universal and solid—the biological aspect. No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard marriages are the fountains of History. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism.

  Then the second reason. Forgive me: but it is simply no good trying to explain this to a woman. The emotional temptations may be worse for
women than for men: but the pressure of mere appetite on the male, they simply don’t understand. In this second reason, the Prayer Book is saying ‘If you can’t be chaste (and most of you can’t) the alternative is marriage’. This may be brutal sense, but, to a man, it is sense, and that’s that.

  The third reason gives the thing that matters far more than ‘being in love’ and will last and increase, between good people, long after ‘love’ in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood—the partnership, the loyalty to ‘the firm’, the composite creature. (Remember it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman cd have been equally happy with any one of ‘tens of thousands’ of other women. i.e. the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis wh. may have brought the people together that matters.)

  Now the second reason involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be ‘one flesh’. He says nothing about two ‘who married for love’: the mere fact of marriage at all—however it came about—sets up the ‘one flesh’. There is a terrible comment on this in I Cor. VI. 16 ‘he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh’. You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation wh. has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions—some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not. This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up—but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told. (Cf.—what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?)

  From this all the rest flows. (1) The seriousness of sexual sin and the importance of marriage as ‘a remedy against sin’. (I don’t mean, of course, that sins of that sort will not, like others, be forgiven if they are repented, nor that the ‘eternal relations’ wh. they have set up will not be redeemed. We believe that God will use all repented evil as fuel for fresh good in the end.) (2) The permanence of marriage wh. means that the intention of fidelity matters more than ‘being in love’. (3) The Headship of the Man.

  I’m sorry about this—and I feel that my defence of it wd be more convincing if I were a woman. You see, of course, that if marriage is a permanent relation, intended to produce a kind of new organism (‘the one flesh’) there must be a Head. It’s only so long as you make it a temporary arrangement dependent on ‘being in love’ and changeable by frequent divorce, that it can be strictly democratic—for, on that view, when they really differ, they part. But if they are not to part, if the thing is like a nation not a club, like an organism not a heap of stones, then, in the long run, one party or other must have the casting vote. That being so, do you really want the Head to be the woman? In a particular instance, no doubt you may. But do you really want a matriarchal world? Do you really like women in authority? When you seek authority yourself, do you naturally seek it in a woman?

  Your phrase about the ‘slave-wife’ is mere rhetoric, because it assumes servile subordination to be the only kind of subordination. Aristotle cd have taught you better. ‘The householder governs his slave despotically. He governs his wife and children as being both free—but he governs the children as a constitutional monarch, and the wife politically’ (i.e. as a democratic magistrate governs a democratic citizen).

  My own feeling is that the Headship of the husband is necessary to protect the outer world against the family. The female has a strong instinct to fight for its cubs. What do nine women out of ten care about justice to the outer world when the health, or career, or happiness of their own children is at stake? That is why I want the ‘foreign policy’ of the family, so to speak, to be determined by the man; I expect more mercy from him! Yet this fierce maternal instinct must be preserved, otherwise the enormous sacrifices involved in motherhood wd never be borne. The Christian scheme, therefore, does not suppress it but protects us defenceless bachelors from its worst ravages! This, however, is only my own idea. The Headship doctrine is that of Christianity. I take it to be chiefly about man as man and woman as woman, and therefore about husbands and wives, since it is only in marriage that they lawfully meet as epitomes of their sex. Notice that in I Cor. XI just after the bit about the man being the Head, St Paul goes on to add the baffling reservation (v. 11) that the sexes ‘in the Lord’ don’t have any separate existence. I have no idea what this means: but I take it it must imply that the existence of a man or woman is not exhausted by the fact of being male or female, but that they exist in many other modes.

  I mean, you may be a citizen, a musician, a teacher etc. as well as a woman, and you needn’t transfer to all these personalities everything that is said about you as wife qua wife. I think that is the answer to your view that the Headship doctrine wd prevent women going in for education. St Paul is not a system maker, you know. As a Jew, he must, for instance, have believed that a man ought to honour and obey his Mother: but he doesn’t stop and put that in when talking about the man being Head in marriage. As for Martha & Mary, either Christ and St Paul are inconsistent here, or they are not. If they’re not, then, whether you can see how or not, St Paul’s doctrine can’t have the sense you give it. If they are inconsistent, then the authority of Christ of course completely over-rides that of St Paul. In either event, you needn’t bother.

  I very strongly agree that it’s no use trying to create a ‘feeling’. But what feeling do you want to have? Isn’t your problem one of thought, not feeling? The question is ‘Is Christianity true—or even, is there some truth mixed up in it?’ The thing in reading Macdonald is not to try to have the feelings he has, but to notice whether the whole thing does or does not agree with such perceptions (I mean, about good & evil etc.) as you already have—and, where it doesn’t, whether it or you are right.

  Term begins on Saturday next. If you and the gudeman cd come and lunch with me on the following Saturday (27th) it wd suit admirably. Let me know (address to College). Thank you for taking my mind off the war for an hour or so!

  P.S. I don’t think the Marriage Service is ascetic, and I think your real objection to it may be that it’s not prudish enough! The service is not for celebrating the flesh, but for making a solemn agreement in the presence of God and of society—an agreement which involves a good many other things besides the flesh . . . ‘Sober and godly matrons’ may be a stickler, if you haven’t read the English Schools: but you ought to know that all the associations you are putting into it are modern and accidental. It means ‘Married women (matrons) who are religious (godly) and have something better and happier to think about than jazz and lipstick (sober).’ But you must know that as well as I do!

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  21 April 1940

  I never told you a curious thing—I have meant to include it in several letters—wh. provides a new instance of the malignity of the Little People. I was going into town one day and had got as far as the gate when I realized that I had odd shoes on, and one of them clean and the other dirty. There was no time to go back. As it was impossible to clean the dirty one, I decided that the only way of making myself look less ridiculous was to dirty the clean one. Now wd you have believed that this is an impossible operation? You can of course get some mud on it—but it remains obviously a clean shoe that has had an accident and won’t look in the least like a shoe that you have been for a walk in. One discovers new catches and snags in life every day . . .

  TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

  2 June 1940

  Mrs Moore told me yesterday about your loss of your mother. I cannot imagine myself, in similar circumstances, no
t feeling very strongly felix opportunitate mortis, but I daresay, when it comes to the point, that is very far from being the predominant emotion; I have always remembered what you told me of the dream in which you were condemned to death and of the part your mother played in it. I am very sorry you should have this particular desolation added to the general one in which we are. It is like the first act of Prometheus ‘Peace is in the grave, the grave hides all things beautiful and good’. He was near, however, to his release when he said that, and I accept the omen—that you and I and our friends will soon be past the worst, if not in one way, then in the other. For I am very thankful to say that while my often plays tricks I am ashamed of, I retain my faith, as I have no doubt you do yours. ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’—This is from Lady Julian of Norwich whom I have been reading lately and who seems, in the Fifteenth century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’ reconciliation of Aristotle and Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity with Kant.

  The real difficulty is, isn’t it, to adapt ones steady beliefs about tribulation to this particular tribulation; for the particular, when it arrives, always seems so peculiarly intolerable. I find it helpful to keep it very particular—to stop thinking about the ruin of the world etc., for no one is going to experience that, and to see it as each individual’s personal sufferings, which never can be more than those of one man, or more than one man, if he were very unlucky, might have suffered in peacetime.

  Do you get sudden lucid intervals? islands of profound peace? I do: and though they don’t last, I think one brings something away from them.

  I wish we could meet more, but I can hardly reckon on any one evening at present. But make no mistake: if you ever feel inclined to doubt whether (to talk in our old style!) language really is a P.O.S., you needn’t. All is well still—except ones stomach.